It’s been less than a day since I announced the relaunch of this site. For the record, here’s what the site currently looks like:

In a word: “Desolate”.

Before we panic about the million things that still need to be added to this site, let’s list a few of the major objectives that have already been achieved:

• Maintenance costs have been reset to zero. No content means no maintenance! Yay!
• Major revisions can be introduced in a controlled manner. This site now lives inside of a git repository instead of a Wordpress Database. Hence, it is actually possible to implement changes without having to tinker with the live production site!!!
• Mistakes can be reverted. On a related note, it’s also trivial to roll back to previous versions of the site now! So, if something does go wrong, it can be fixed it in minutes instead of hours/days.
• Monetary costs have been reduced to nearly zero. The site now consists entirely of static content, which means it no longer requires its own dedicated server. Therefore, it is now possible to take advantage of cost-effective hosting solutions.

Hooray! So much progress!

… But, there is still a ton of work to do. Here are some items that I need to tackle in the near future:

• Reintroduce Comment Support. I want to allow readers to leave their comments and feedback. I almost typed “Please leave your suggestions for implementing this feature”, but then I realized… yeah. So, if you do have any suggestions, then feel free to tweet them to me at @BrianLauber.
• Add Social Media Links. Speaking of Twitter: I need to add my social media links to the Site. I also need to add the “Share” buttons for various platforms.
• Figure out how to organize URLs. Should blog posts include timestamps in their URLs? If so, then what if I make revisions to a blog post 3 days later? Gah — so many questions!
• Begin introducing non-blog pages to the site. I want to have dedicated pages for things like “Programming Proverbs” and “Horrible Names to Give Your Children”. But, I need to make some decisions about basic site navigation first.
• Write some new posts. I have a backlog of posts that I’ve been thinking about writing for the last 2 years. So, I need to actually get a jump on that!
• Re-publish some vintage posts. A lot of good posts got lost in the clutter of the old site. It’s time to give some of these a second look! Plus… this way I won’t need to write new posts as quickly. O:)
• Revise the site’s layout and style. At the moment, the site mostly consists of boilerplate code / styles. I’d like to customize this a bit to allow for more sophisticated navigation. Or, at the very least: I’d like to remove the inline styles from the HTML!

Hmm… on second thought, this TODO list actually seems fairly manageable. Maybe nuking the entire vintage site wasn’t such a bad idea after all…

(Erm, I mean — of course! This was my plan all along!)